Dark Duets Part 3

DARK WITNESS.

Charlaine Harris and Rachel Caine.

It seemed to Emma Saxon that she'd been driving forever when she saw the crosses. No-not the crosses. First, she saw the woman.

Mom, her daughter Laurel's voice was saying, in the blurry, distorted tempo of a slowed recording. We'll be late if we don't hurry up. So Laurel must have been in the pa.s.senger seat, but Emma couldn't seem to turn her head that way. The road was black, the headlights showing nothing, yet somehow there was a woman kneeling down under a single streetlight. Her image was broken into stark blacks and whites by the harsh light.

She was hammering crosses into the hard ground.

Two crosses: mere crooked boards, nailed together, painted white. Cheap tinsel streamers floated from them in an unseen, unfelt wind.

Emma was pressing the gas but the van was slowing down, slowing down, and to Emma's horror the woman turned to look at her. She had only a black hole for a face and a flash of pale, nauseatingly yellow eyes. The horrible woman inclined her head toward the crosses, and Emma had to look. The crosses read EMMA and LAUREL in crooked letters of blood, blood that dripped down the chilly white of the crosses, and her daughter was saying Mom, we're going to be late, late, late . . .

And then Emma turned her head, finally, away from the crosses and the light and the blood and the eyes, and he was sitting in the pa.s.senger seat, smiling at her with that sharply handsome face and those p.i.s.s-yellow eyes and she opened her mouth to scream and the scream turned into a shrill electronic shriek that went on and on and on . . .

Emma opened her eyes and slapped at the snooze b.u.t.ton on the alarm clock. She missed the first two times, got it the third. In the sudden, terribly thick silence she tried to get her breath, tried to blink the tears out of her eyes. The room felt very cold, and she turned on her side and wrapped the covers more tightly around her shaking body.

Not again, not again, I thought I was past this. . .

She'd stopped having dreams about the b.a.s.t.a.r.d years ago. Why was she thinking about him now? What had she done to deserve that new trip into h.e.l.l?

The shower started up in the hall bathroom, and Emma groaned into her pillow. Laurel was already up. Although she was more than old enough to get up, fix her own breakfast, and be off to school, Emma had made it a rule to sit down with her daughter every morning, even if there was only time for a cup of coffee (for Emma, milk for Laurel) and a breakfast pastry apiece. Emma needed that touchstone of normal life.

Get up, Emma told herself, but part of her didn't want to obey. The bed was warm and safe, and the world out there . . . that was cold, and uncertain, and-with the dream lingering in her head-terrifying. Get up for Laurel. You have to do it.

That got her moving, though she felt frail and her skin was sensitive, as if she were recovering from a feverish illness. Everyday items seemed oddly juxtaposed, sinister, dangerous. Emma hesitated before thrusting her bare feet into her slippers, sure they hid scorpions or spiders, but when she stood she felt only the normal comfort of cotton-covered foam. She put on her bathrobe, brushed her hair, and was in the kitchen taking out the ingredients for scrambled eggs before Laurel came down the hall.

Her daughter was sixteen, and with the birthday had come att.i.tude, tons of it. She was wearing eyeliner today. Emma didn't protest; they'd had a fight about last week's experimentation with eye shadow, which had been extremely overdone, so now she elected to pick the battles she was likely to win. The eyeliner looked good; it made Laurel's rich brown eyes seem larger and brought out the golden gleam in their depths.

Gold, not yellow. It isn't yellow. "Good morning, sweetheart," Emma said, her voice coming out in a croak. She cracked four eggs into a bowl while clearing her throat. "Sleep well?"

Laurel grunted. Yes or no? It didn't much matter. She was at that awkward stage where she could-and would-mutter secretively to her friends for hours on her cell phone, but you couldn't get three words in a row from her if you were her mother. Even now, Laurel pushed her long, straight hair back over her shoulders in an absent gesture and bent over her phone, fingers flying as she texted. Emma had tried to make a no-phone-before-breakfast rule, but that had been a battle she definitely couldn't win. She said, mildly, "No phone at the kitchen table, Laurel; you know that."

Laurel groaned dramatically, but she put the phone on the counter next to her backpack. She emphasized her instant boredom by drumming her fingers on the table, maintaining her silence.

Fine. Let her work for it. "Milk's in the fridge," Emma said.

"Where else would it be?" Laurel asked, and rolled her eyes, but she got up and poured herself a gla.s.s. Without being prodded, she loaded the coffeemaker and set it to brew, a hopeful sign of morning cooperation. Emma whisked eggs and loaded up the skillet, made toast, and plated the food. The two of them sat down to eat in (mostly) companionable silence. Emma made two attempts to find out what Laurel planned to do over the weekend. Laurel's response was a shrug that could mean anything.

Typical.

Laurel gulped down her eggs, toast, and milk, hastily dumped her dishes in the sink, and grabbed her backpack and phone as if they were life preservers in a shark-filled ocean. She headed for the door.

"Forget something?" Emma asked, standing. Laurel sighed-dramatically, of course-and came back to give her mom a quick kiss on the cheek. "That's better. Have a good day, honey. And call me when you're on the way home."

"I can walk three blocks, Mom; I'm not five."

"Just to be safe, okay?" Emma said quietly.

"Okay! You know, you have to let me grow up."

"Sure. But not today."

The put-upon look on Laurel's face was pricelessly funny, but Emma didn't laugh-at least, not until her daughter slammed the door and went jogging down the driveway to meet her friends for the walk to school. Next year, she'll be driving, she thought. Dear G.o.d. How am I going to survive that?

But next year's problems were just a dark cloud on the horizon. Emma felt better now, stronger, more in control of her life as she washed the breakfast things. She showered briskly, dressed for work, and headed off to the office. As she drove, she thought of her one o'clock meeting, and the presentation she had to prepare before then. Of course, accounting wouldn't have any of the figures ready until an hour before. It was a relief to occupy her mind with the mundane. How could she have let the dream spook her so badly? Why had she even had such a nightmare?

She had no idea what had brought it on until she stopped for a red light four blocks away from their house. Something fluttered at the edge of her vision. With dread, she turned her head to look. Two white crosses had been pounded into the hard ground, just at the base of a streetlight. Cheap tinsel streamers tangled and bounced in the morning breeze.

Emma's breath caught in her throat. She looked in the rearview mirror. Empty. Impulsively, Emma parked in the gas station lot on the corner. On unsteady legs, she walked over to take a look. The sun was still unbelievably fierce in late September, and the Dallas heat was unrelenting. Scorched gra.s.s crunched like tiny bones beneath her feet, and she felt the dream overlap into reality and bend it all out of shape, into the sharp angles of adrenaline and madness, until she saw the names.

JEREMY. AUDREY. And a faded picture stapled to the larger cross, Audrey's cross, that showed a middle-aged woman with a young boy next to her. There was no indication of what had happened. Weren't such crosses always erected for traffic accidents? She'd never stopped to look at one of these homemade roadside memorials before, and the faded picture brought home to her that the intersection she used every day was a place where someone else's dreams had died.

"Sorry," she said, and felt embarra.s.sed when she heard her own voice. She hurried back to her van and started it up and felt the knot in her stomach slowly untie. The dream was just a dream. Not her name on the cross, and not Laurel's. It was just an ugly mash of truth and fiction, like all nightmares. Now she knew where it had come from. Nothing to worry about.

Accounting didn't have the figures ready when she got there. Typical.

By the time her presentation was over, she'd forgotten all about the dream.

LAUREL BROUGHT HOME friends for dinner. She texted first, though, which gave Emma time to evaluate the contents of her refrigerator. Luckily, there was enough steak and chicken to go around.

When they arrived, all together, Emma knew two of the guests: Laurel's best friend, Amy, she of the curly red hair and pale blue eyes, and Elena, who was dark haired and dark eyed and spoke with a faint Spanish accent. Elena had become a friend more recently, but her manners were good and she had a sweet smile.

This time, for the first time, Laurel had brought home a boy.

He was good-looking, too-a little taller than Laurel, with s.h.a.ggy blondish hair that kept falling in his eyes. He was tanned and fit and broad shouldered. He didn't look up much, but when he did, Emma caught a glimpse of dark eyes. There was something familiar about him-maybe the cheekbones. Perhaps he'd gone to school with Laurel when they were much younger?

Laurel said, "This is Tyler." She didn't say anything else about him, which was unusual. Normally, she'd have been babbling out the details (He's in my history cla.s.s, He's on the tennis team, He wants to design video games). Tyler himself volunteered nothing. He seemed to be working hard at blending in with the furniture. He sat at the far end of the table, as far as he could get from Emma.

"So, Tyler, how do you know the girls?" Emma asked, as she pa.s.sed the potatoes around to Elena. The girls all exchanged quick looks that Emma couldn't read, and Tyler didn't raise his head. He was spooning gravy over his potatoes with great concentration.

"I met Laurel at the library," he said. He spoke softly, and he definitely did not meet her eyes. "We both like biographies."

That was almost suspiciously nonthreatening-like something rehea.r.s.ed. But she supposed it could be true. Laurel nudged the boy, and he said, "History, too."

"I didn't know you liked history," Emma said to her daughter, her tone bright and conversational. "I'm always trying to get you to read historical novels."

"Not novels, Mom. History. Real history. And myth and legend and all kinds of things. You're always trying to get me to read fiction. I don't like fiction."

That was news, because there were shelves of well-read novels in Laurel's room. The Harry Potter series. Tons of paranormal books for teens. All kinds of things that Laurel and her friends had been white-hot pa.s.sionate about for the past few years. Suddenly, that was over.

"What are you all reading now?" Emma asked, and that got the conversation jump-started again, with the girls talking over each other excitedly. Amy was still on the fiction bandwagon. Apparently Elena was the driving force to move Laurel over to the nonfiction shelves.

Tyler stayed quiet, eating his steak as if his life depended on it. He seemed shy and awkward. Despite her native caution, Emma's heart went out to the boy. This wasn't easy for him. Though he ventured a comment every now and then, the girls' conversation flowed over him like a river. At least he was trying.

When dinner was over, Emma served cake and ice cream and put on a movie. She left them to have fun.

A couple of hours later, Emma could hear their voices in the hall and registered that they were saying good-bye. She wasn't listening with much attention: curled up in a chair in her office, she was engrossed in her own book. She didn't expect them to come thank her for the meal, though that would have been nice. She was surprised to hear a quiet knock on the open door. Slipping her bookmark in her place, she looked up to see Tyler standing there.

For a split second, she saw a glint of yellow in his eyes. Something inside her cringed. She scolded herself severely; her reading lamp had a lemon-yellow shade. She'd only seen its reflection. She forced a smile.

"I just wanted to say-" He licked his lips and started again as he s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably, one foot to the other. The boy was very neatly dressed, Emma noticed. He surely hadn't gone to school dressed in the stiff khaki pants, checked s.h.i.+rt, and clean sneakers. "I just wanted to say thanks. For having me in."

Emma smiled more genuinely. How nice! But from his grave face, she could see he wasn't finished.

"I-look, you're going to hate me, I know that, and I just wanted to say that-I'm doing this all wrong."

He looked so wretched that Emma put her book aside and stood up, feeling sorry for him. "It's okay," she said. "Tyler, why in the world would I hate you? If you and Emma are going out together-"

"No!" he said, and looked up at her. Again, she caught that odd flare in his eyes, and she felt the answering sick kick in the pit of her stomach, but it was the lighting. Reflections. Tricks of memory. "No, that's not it. I-look, it's just that I wanted to meet you. I wanted to know why."

"Why . . . ?"

He looked down at his shoes and shook his head. "Why you gave me up," he said. It was almost a whisper. "Why you didn't care. Why you didn't want me."

She sucked in her breath, and it made a sound as sharp as a scream. She stepped back, until the wall stopped her, and she felt cold, unaccountably heavy, as if she might sink straight through the floor. "What-what are you talking about?"

Tyler met her gaze and held it. This time, she saw no glints of yellow, no reflections. Nothing but pain. "I'm your son," he said. "I'm the one you gave away."

And then he turned and started to walk away. She cried out then, a sound that ripped itself out of her soul, and reached out to him-not to hold him, not to hug him, but to push him.

Push him away. Far away.

He didn't stop. He didn't look back. She heard him saying good-bye to Laurel and Amy and Elena, and she heard the other girls leave after him.

But she sat in her chair, numbed, frozen, unable to think what to do or how to stop the destruction that was rus.h.i.+ng at her, at her daughter, at this tight family unit she had built so carefully out of lies.

It was all coming apart.

Kill him, something in her said. Brutal and quiet and practical. Kill him before worse happens.

But she couldn't do it when he'd been born, and she couldn't do it now, not after having seen his pain.

Maybe I was wrong, she thought. It was a frantic thought, a child's desperate plea for mercy. Maybe he's not like his father.

But he was. She knew he was.

Because if he wasn't . . . what did that make her? What awful, terrible monster did that make her?

THE NEXT DAY pa.s.sed in a nightmarish fugue. She didn't know how to find the boy, how to contact him; she couldn't ask Laurel. Her daughter would know something was wrong.

But when Laurel was late coming home, she couldn't stand to wait any longer. She started to call, but no, her voice would betray her.

Texting was safer: Where are you? Who are you with?

She imagined Laurel telling her phone, none of your business, but the text back was more polite. Just Amy and some other ppl. All OK.

Emma couldn't ask the deadly question, Are you with Tyler? She just couldn't. So she compromised. Where are you?

Mall. Emma could almost hear the where else would we be? at the end of that, and see the eye roll. Home soon.

He'd met her at the library. Maybe she wouldn't have invited him shopping. Maybe it might all go away, now that he'd been here, seen Emma, said what he had come to say.

Maybe it was over.

Emma tried to pretend it was, desperately. She made dinner-Laurel's favorite, beef stroganoff. She rehea.r.s.ed answers to questions in her mind. I don't know what he's talking about. Honey, you can't believe what strangers tell you.

She was stirring in the noodles when she heard Laurel's keys in the door. Without turning, she said, "Hey, honey, thanks for being on time." Which, of course, Laurel wasn't; sarcasm was a nervous defense against the fear churning inside her.

Because she didn't turn, she missed whatever nonverbal cues Laurel might have been giving her, but she couldn't miss the tone in her daughter's voice. The hard, flat, angry tone. "Why didn't you tell me?" Laurel asked.

Emma put down the spoon and turned to look at her, and with one glance she knew, knew, that it was all going to fall apart. There was no rehearsal for this. No possible response that made any sense at all.

"Why didn't you tell me I had a brother?" Laurel said, and the sick feeling in Emma's stomach turned black and toxic, and she sank down in a chair at the kitchen table, staring blindly at her hands. On the stove, the stroganoff bubbled and hissed, and she ought to be stirring it, but she didn't care. Let it burn. "Mom? Mom! Answer me!"

That last rose to a shout, almost to a scream, and Emma raised her gaze to fix on her daughter's. The golden flecks in those eyes. The fury in her face. The betrayal.

For sixteen years, she'd kept secrets, and now . . . now they were out. But she tried anyway.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Emma said. Her lips felt numbed, as if someone had hit her. "Honey-"

"Tyler. I'm talking about Tyler!" Laurel spat. "He has all the papers, all the proof that we're twins. Twins. And you gave him up? Why did you give him up? How could you? Didn't you love him? Do you even love me? My G.o.d, what are you?"

It was all black with pain, all of this, and she hated hearing it in Laurel's voice, knowing that her daughter was infected with this horror too. She'd tried to s.h.i.+eld her. Tried her very best to make it go away.

But like the dream, it came back.

Emma took in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said, "I had to give him up. I couldn't keep him."

"Why?" It was a wail, and she heard the tears in her daughter's voice.

Against the black velvet backdrop of her closed lids, Emma saw a flash of yellow eyes. "Because . . . because I would have hurt him," she said. "It was the only way I could save him, Laurel. I kept you because I could. But he-he was-" She couldn't explain this, not in a way that her daughter would ever understand.

"He was what? He was just a baby!" That last rose to a scream of raw fury and hurt, and then it was too late; Laurel was gone, the door slammed loudly enough to rattle gla.s.s, and Emma opened her eyes and wiped away tears and realized, with a jolt of horror, that her daughter was running away from her.

Into the dark.

Toward an evil she knew nothing whatsoever about.

Still, she tried. She ran out the front door just in time to watch her daughter slam the pa.s.senger door of a sedan, catching a glimpse of Tyler behind the wheel as it sped away. He's too young to drive, she thought ridiculously, conventionally, knowing that was the least of her problems. She wheeled back into the house and flew into action.

Emma had sense enough to take dinner off the stove and dump it aside, and sense enough to open up the gun safe and take out the two things she'd sworn she would never need again: the silver-coated knife and the revolver filled with custom-cast silver bullets.

The other thing in the gun safe was a manila file folder. Emma hesitated, then grabbed it. The file. The whole story. Gruesomely ill.u.s.trated. She didn't know if it would do any good at all, but she took it anyway. She changed into dark pants, dark s.h.i.+rt, black jacket: like an a.s.sa.s.sin, she told herself. In case sneaking was necessary.